On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I cook hot cereal for my Type A husband's breakfast. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I bake something interesting and exciting. It is more efficient when I plan what I'm going to bake the night before. However I am a spontaneous cook, so quite often I get up in the morning looking for inspiration.

It was that way on Tuesday. I wanted to fix something totally new and different. So I started looking through cookbooks. In "Feasting Naturally with your Friends" I found a recipe for Peanut butter muffins. It sounded very Type A. The recipe said that it took 30 - 35 minutes to prepare, and I had exactly that much time before hungry family members would invade the kitchen.

However, preparation wasn't quite as quick as the recipe claimed, probably because I made a couple of beneficial substitutions. When the batter was all prepared and ready to go into the muffin tins, there was less than 10 minutes until breakfast had to be on the table. I was not going to make it.

Close to panic, I had an idea. Plug in the grill; make pancakes. The grill heated quickly and I poured out circles of muffin batter. They didn't bubble like normal pancakes would, but they browned nicely and I flipped them to the other side. I served them with frozen blueberries and strawberries.

My daughter said, "These were supposed to be muffins weren't they?" I nodded and laughed, asking how they tasted. "They're really good!" she said. My husband said they were great. After the two of them left the house, I could have baked the rest of the batter as muffins. Instead I thinned the batter with a little more soy milk, and cooked it all as pancakes. They are in the freezer waiting for another day when I need a quick idea for breakfast.

This entry was posted on January 12th, 2005 at 04:15:00 pm and is filed under Earlier Blogs.